Tag: energy efficiency

Quote: Finally, a few links, details and instructions for those of you who want to get rolling with the tools. The nodes are available in Dynamo’s package manager, using a recent daily build of Dynamo. We expect an official release with this functionality by the end of October, but in the meantime you can use a daily build to use the tools. …To install the package, search for the name in the Dynamo package manager – Dynamo > Packages > Search for a package > ‘Energy Analysis for Dynamo’ – and install the package. Once the package is installed, you’ll likely want to check out our sample files in the package’s ‘extra’ folder, and watch our first round of tutorial videos (1,2). …We should also note that some analytical information (constructions, schedules, etc.) can only be analyzed using Dynamo on top of Vasari. The source code is available on Github under an Apache v2 license – it is open for anyone to use and modify.

This post looks at the post-processing side of the energy modeling workflow. Often, a spreadsheet tool like Excel is a first choice for many analysis tasks. This is great for simple cases, but if the number of files or the amount of data is large or complex, Excel will cost you time and lead to errors. This is where you should turn to Python!

PHPP—the energy modeling software for the Passive House energy-efficiency standard—requires users to input wall areas calculated to the exterior of the thermal boundary. By default Revit does not calculate wall areas this way. Gregory Duncan Architect created a workaround to create a wall schedule that can export meaningful information to PHPP.

Identify in your simulation workflow something that you need to do manually many times for each simulation, or something you need to do for each of your many simulations. If you can write the problem down in one sentence, it’s a great candidate for scripting.

Next, break up the problem into many small simple steps, this is your pseudocode.

Now try to write it out in Python. Remember, Google is your best friend, if you have a question about something in Python, chances are there have been hundreds of others out there with the same question!

Finally, once it all works, clean up and comment your code, think about how you or someone else might use it in a year!

Depending on where you live in the world, you likely have to satisfy certain regulatory authorities as to the environmental performance of you building. Various external tools may be used for this.

However, what if you could configure your Schedules in Revit to do these calculations for you? Youtube user FreshgroundEarth has uploaded a video describing how to do this to satisfy SANS (South Africa National Standards) requirements:

At about 7 mins, he demonstrates the use of a ‘gizmo’ placed on elevation, enabling the calculation of facade area, which in turn relates to mechanical heating / cooling calculations. He also calculates glazing areas using a parameter filtering method.

This is a good demonstration of leveraging the Revit model for a specific regulatory condition.

It would be nice if *one day* the various regulatory authorities actually provide Revit templates that are already set up for these calculations, to save each company in each part of the world from reinventing the wheel to suit the regulatory constraints of each particular project.